Environment & Climate Change

18 Items

Students at left watch as student activists take positions in the Cathedral of Learning

AP/Keith Srakocic

Journal Article - Environmental Politics

Fossil Fuel Divestment and Public Climate Change Policy Preferences: An Experimental Test in Three Countries

| 2023

Divestment is a prominent strategy championed by activists to induce positive social change. For example, the current fossil fuel divestment movement includes over 1,500 institutions that control $40 trillion in assets. A primary pathway through which divestment is theorized to be effective is by influencing public beliefs and policy preferences, thus pressuring policymakers to take action. However, prior research only tests this argument via qualitative case studies. The authors assess the impact of exposure to information about fossil fuel divestment on public opinion through the use of national survey experiments in three major greenhouse gas emitters: the U.S., India, and South Africa.

The Plutonium Mountain Mission: Lessons

Analysis & Opinions - Power & Policy Blog

The Plutonium Mountain Mission: Lessons

| Sep. 27, 2013

In Summer of 2013, The Project on Managing the Atom released “Plutonium Mountain: Inside the 17-Year Mission to Secure a Dangerous Legacy of Soviet Nuclear Testing.” In the report, Eben Harrell and David Hoffman tell how dedicated scientists and engineers in three countries overcame suspicions, secrecy, bureaucracy, and logistical obstacles to secure more than a dozen bombs worth of plutonium that had been left behind at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although the outline of the Semipalatinsk operation had been made public before, the report filled in new details.

Melting ice pack in the polar region.

Analysis & Opinions - The Boston Globe

Shell's Arctic Troubles Only Buy Time

| January 10, 2013

"...[T]o believe that the market will maintain its current risk assessment forever is to believe in the power of magical thinking. The economic and political stakes are overwhelmingly in favor of drilling. The White House is pushing for domestic sources of energy. Alaska's elected and tribal leadership will gain much from taxes on new economic activity. And our foreign competitors near the Arctic circle — including Russia, which sent an oil tanker through the Arctic during in December — are ready to plunge into the cold."

A Northeast Natural Energy natural gas well , top, seen from Morgantown, W.V., on Aug. 6, 2011. The well is the subject of a dispute over a drilling ban recently enacted by Morgantown, which is directly across the Monongahela River from it.

AP Photo

Analysis & Opinions - The Boston Globe

Re-thinking the Fracking Debate

| August 22, 2011

"Natural gas is a big deal, and fracking has transformed energy policies. Natural gas now constitutes 25 percent of US energy consumption. In only 10 years, shale gas, released through fracking, has risen from 2 to 30 percent of all natural-gas production. Shale depositories in states as geographically diverse as Texas, Montana, and New York have made the US essentially self-sufficient in natural-gas production, and even potentially an exporter of the commodity."

Belfer Center Newsletter Spring 2011

- Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School Quarterly Journal: International Security

Belfer Center Newsletter Spring 2011

| Spring 2011

The Spring 2011 issue of the Belfer Center newsletter features recent and upcoming activities, research, and analysis by members of the Center community on critical global issues. This issue highlights the Belfer Center’s continuing efforts to build bridges between the United States and Russia to prevent nuclear catastrophe – an effort that began in the 1950s. This issue also features three new books by Center faculty that sharpen global debate on critical issues: God’s Century, by Monica Duffy Toft, The New Harvest by Calestous Juma, and The Future of Power, by Joseph S. Nye.